


Like Vines

by momebie (katilara)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-06
Updated: 2015-05-06
Packaged: 2018-03-29 06:52:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3886498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katilara/pseuds/momebie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Communication is hard, especially when one of you can't speak at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Vines

**Author's Note:**

> I have a lot of feelings about Adam Parrish. I have a lot of feelings about [tree people](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/77770492885/likebranchesfromyourspine). Adam Parrish gave himself to a forest. This was only inevitable.

It’s late, the kind of late that feels reckless as it bleeds into early around the edges. Adam and Ronan are side by side in the dark, Adam on his mattress and Ronan on the floor. They’ve been talking. Here, in his dream as his mind replays the evening, Ronan can’t remember what they’ve been talking about. Everything, probably. 

Adam says things in the dark that he would never, ever say in the light and Ronan needs to be there to hear them now. He tells himself it’s out of friendship, because God knows Adam doesn’t talk to anyone else this way and everyone needs someone to share the darkest parts of himself with, but really Ronan’s addicted to the inner workings of Adam Parrish. During the day he has Adam’s graceful face and shoulders and long stride. At night he has Adam’s thoughts and fears and the little stories he makes up to pass the time at work. Hair of the dog, the only thing that really settles Ronan into his skin anymore.

Tonight Ronan feels daring. He doesn’t know why. He hasn’t been drinking. It’s not any different than any other night they spend together and there’s certainly been no indication that his foolish confession will be taken any better on this night in particular. They’d eaten and pretended to study and bickered and turned the lights out. Their knees had touched beneath Adam’s Latin text. Their fingers had touched over a bag of chips. Everything is as it always is, except for Ronan who has an unease building in his restless limbs that he doesn’t know how to release. So he does what he always does when he can’t fathom himself. He does something stupid. 

There’s a break in Adam’s story and Ronan sits up, bringing the sheet with him and huddling beneath it. Adam looks up at him from underneath heavy lids, probably assuming that Ronan is going to keep getting up and go to the bathroom. Ronan considers doing just that for a moment, the way a man in a sinking submarine must consider the escape hatch knowing that he’s too deep to make it to the surface anyway. He stays put. 

“What’s up?” Adam says, voice thick. 

“Um,” Ronan says, eloquently. 

He wants to have a grand speech. He wants to have an essay with three solid points as to why it would be a good idea for Adam Parrish to let Ronan kiss him and then a rousing conclusion to bring it home. He has nothing. It’s curious how a person can spend so much time thinking about a moment and then be completely unprepared for it when it comes. 

In real life Ronan had mumbled, flubbed his words, had had to say it again louder so Adam could hear. In the dream he only says it once, masochistically loud and clear. “I think I like you.” 

“I like you too,” Adam says, in exactly the same half-awake way he’d said it before. 

“No,” Ronan says. “I like, want to kiss you.” 

Adam peers at him in the darkness, eyes narrowed. Then, after too long he says, “Very funny.” 

Ronan closes his eyes. His cheeks burn with shame and it’s so much hotter in his dream than it was in the moment. Probably because he’s over the shock of it now. “I’m not kidding,” he says, as if he’s asking Adam to fight him. 

Adam props himself up on his elbow and studies Ronan with wider eyes, but doesn’t make any move to come closer. He nods, swallows hard in a way that fills Ronan with dread, and says, “Okay.” Acknowledgment without disgust, but not acceptance, not emotion.

“Okay?” Ronan says, sneer creeping into his voice as armor. 

“What do you want me to say?” He sounds bewildered and only now does Ronan consider that it might have been an actual question. 

What does Ronan want him to say? Surprisingly, not ‘okay’, though it was probably always going to be the second most likely thing he would say right behind ‘I’m not gay.’ Ronan’s up and he has his shoes on before he speaks again. “Nothing, Parrish. I don’t want you to say anything. I just thought you should know.” 

He pushes the door to Adam’s apartment open and slams it shut behind him, runs down the steps two at a time, and then bursts out into the night. Except this time it’s not the night, it’s his forest. His place for figuring everything out waits on him, ready to swallow him up in a way Adam won’t. He dives into it. 

Tonight the forest is cloaked in a low, grey mist that resolves into fog on its floor. He picks his way carefully over the landscape, since he can’t see anything below his knees. It’s some kind of asshole metaphor, it has to be. He only has himself to blame after all. Why did he think it could possibly end any other way? Why had he even bothered? Everything will be ruined now. 

He stumbles through the landscape for a long time before something in him shifts and he knows, in the way of dreams, that he’s looking for Adam. Probably so his subconscious can relish in being right and show him Adam’s confused face again, a confusion that has to be every bit as much of a mask as the horror of wood and blood and skin he’d tried to rip off of Adam before. 

There is no way Adam doesn’t know how Ronan feels, even without him saying it out loud. No way he has missed the looks and the longing and the hundred daily ways Ronan goes out of his way to be the person Adam needs him to be. Well, needs anyone to be, not Ronan specifically he’s sure, but it’s not like there’s a long line of people waiting for the chance. Just him, alone in a forest, pushed by a nebulous sense of urgency he can’t place and a fear he refuses to examine. 

Adam, when he finally finds him, is kneeling next to a stream of slate colored water that the fog itself seems to be afraid to cross. It roils up either side of the banks and crashes against an invisible wall. Ronan watches the mist swirl around Adam’s elbows as he bends over to dip his hands in. 

He’s wearing a blue and gold plaid button up that Ronan knows he doesn’t own. The shirt itself belonged in some crude fashion advert that he had squirreled away in his dresser. It’s the kind of gaudy, tasteless thing where no one is sure what the store actually sells, because so many of the models are wearing almost nothing. Ronan can’t be sure, but it seems unlikely that it’s legal to sell the abs of a teenage boy, not that he hasn’t considered purchasing some on the off-chance it is. That particular model, with the shirt flapping in the wind so that his broad chest and thin hips and stomach are visible, had Adam’s hair and his long legs. Ronan had folded the paper down over the face, which had a too broad jaw and overly boastful smile. That might sell shirts, but it wasn’t what Ronan was looking for. 

The shirt is stretched tight across Adam’s slumped shoulders as if fighting being closed. Adam bends forward more and a seam rips in the shoulder. The sound is slow, the pops echoing one stitch at a time through the near silence of the forest. _Why is the forest so silent?_ Ronan thinks. The forest is never this silent. 

“You don’t want to do that,” Ronan says. Mostly to fill the cavernous echoes with something, anything. 

“I don’t?” Adam doesn’t look up from the stream. “This is your water. Why wouldn’t it be safe? It should be like drinking from you. You're safe, aren’t you? For me at least?”

Ronan thinks about Adam’s chapped, thin lips and what they might look like dotted with Ronan’s own sweat. _Please_ , he thinks, _please drink from me instead_. But that would probably be dangerous too. 

“I know you know about Lethe. About Acheron and Styx. Drinking magic water never works out the way we want.” 

“What could you possible know about what I want?” he says, and there’s no heat or accusation in it at all. 

Another actual question that Ronan doesn’t know how to answer. It sounds so very much like something the Adam in the real world would say that Ronan begins to doubt he’s dreaming at all. He feels a rush of embarrassment and shame flare through him and focuses on the shirt. None of this is real. 

Adam turns finally, twisting to peer back over his shoulder with narrowed eyes. Ronan scowls, he can’t help himself. He’ll take all kinds of slights from the flesh and blood Adam Parrish, but he doesn’t have to take this shit from himself. He had thought, foolishly he knows, that taming the horrors meant his mind would stop fighting him. Clearly it has just made it more cunning. He’d be proud if he didn’t feel so helpless. 

Standing, Adam turns around and wipes his damp hands on his jeans. The sleeves of the shirt are rolled up to his elbows and the veins and tendons in his forearms are moving fitful beneath his skin, shifting as if trying to find a place to settle. Ronan wants to move his lips over them, to sing the whole of Adam’s form into a sort of peace. In his childhood he had been taught so many lilting old country songs about men who had done wrong and been done wrong. They’ve only now started to make any sort of sense. 

“I know what you don’t want,” he says, and takes a small satisfaction from the way this specter flinches. _Hurt me_ , he thinks, _I’m still fighting back_. 

“What I want doesn’t matter anymore,” Adam says. He cuts his eyes away from Ronan, looks upstream, and examines the distant shadows of the twisting dark trees there. There’s a note of wariness about him that Ronan hasn’t seen in his fiercely new Adam in what feels like so very long. “I’m running out of time.” 

“We’re all running out of time,” Ronan says cautiously. He doesn’t know what it is Adam is afraid of, but unless Glendower can grant immortality every one of them is fighting a battle with time they’re destined to lose. Then again if Glendower’s immortality does exist, but only as a state like that of his own precipice sleep, Ronan wouldn’t take it. Not even if it meant being left alone for an eternity in his woods to mold his own impossible boy.

“No,” Adam says, jaw set square. “Rapidly. Come here.” 

Ronan steps back instead of forward and studies Adam, not trusting it. Adam lets out an impatient huff and holds his hand out, not like he’s reaching but like he’s displaying something, open flat with his palm up. Ronan takes a step closer. Then another. 

It looks like there’s something moving under the thin skin there more insistently than the the vine-like veins in his arms. As Ronan watches a thin green tendril climbs up from between the cracks in Adam’s skin. It sprouts in a matter of seconds, the head bursting into a dusty yellow flute of a flower. Ronan moves right up to Adam and grasps his hand, turning it over and searching for any other abnormalities. There are none. Just the perfect yellow flower perched in Adam’s perfect palm. 

“I’m running out of time,” he says again.

“What do you mean?” Ronan asks.

“I mean the forest is claiming me. It is a part of me and I am a part of it, except I don’t belong. We’re not alike. It’s making me like it.”

The words _I think I like you_ echo in Ronan’s head and morph into the more desperate _I think I’m like you. Take me, it could take me_. 

But of course that’s not true. Ronan already has a designated function for Cabeswater. It needs him just as he is. His mind is suddenly flooded with a crisp image of a gnarled trunk grown over with flesh colored mushroom caps weeping bright red. It terrifies him more than anything else ever has. He goes cold. 

“What about your hands and eyes? How will it use those when you no longer have any?”

“It doesn’t need them like it did. It needs something else now.”

 _No, it’s a lie. I need you as you are so the forest must need you as you are_. “What can I do?”

“Nothing.” 

“Bullshit, nothing,” he growls. “It’s my forest.” 

“No,” Adam says, shaking his head slowly. “A forest can’t belong to a person, Ronan. Anymore than another person can.” 

_No, it’s a lie. I belong to you_. “What do you need?”

“You.” 

The silence is unnerving Ronan. Where is the thunder meant to greet his rage? Where are the rustling branches meant to answer his cries? Why is it only the trickling of the constant water and the steady breath of a beautiful boy reaching his ears? How closely are those things related? He laughs darkly. “No you don’t. I’ve already been down this road this evening.” 

Adam wraps his arms around his own shoulders and twists. There’s a small popping creak when he does it. “There is not a single universe where I don’t need you.” 

“Need is different than want,” Ronan says bitterly. 

“Is it?”

 _Yes_ , Ronan thinks. _Because I have wanted you for so much longer than I’ve needed you and now both of them hurt like separate wounds_. “Is this you or the trees talking?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.” 

“Ronan,” Adam’s eyes go dark like a cloud has passed over just his face. “Please, I can’t.” He gestures downward with his flower and palm and the fog clears enough for Ronan to see his bare feet, greying and growing tendrils of their own down into the soft, wet dirt. Ronan is horrified. This is his fault. His forest. His fault. 

Adam reaches out with his flowered hand and places it against Ronan’s cheek. The petals tickle his skin before Adam’s warm fingers smooth it over. Ronan brings his hand up to grasp Adam’s and Adam pulls back slowly, bringing Ronan with him, eyes bright with intent. They kiss, two flashes of hope melting into one in a landscape etched from sorrow. 

Ronan has kissed Adam in his dreams before and it is always insubstantial. It only ever leaves him wanting more. In his dreams Adam is just a shadow of a boy pretending to be made of warm blood and stubborn bone that is never warm enough, never stubborn enough. When he does give in he does it too easily. This Adam is rougher, harder, like he’s something else entirely--a mixture of the clouds Ronan can touch and the ruddy forest of a boy he cannot. Ronan could love this Adam, if his mind would let him. It might even be enough for a time. 

He wraps his arms around Adam and runs his hands up and down his back. He can feel Adam’s spine shifting beneath his skin. Adam kisses Ronan roughly with no mind for where his lips and tongue and teeth are actually landing. He’s kissing him like he’s drinking the last of the water from the canteen. Maybe Ronan should have let him drink from the stream after all. It’s bound to be purer than his spit and his naked want. 

Adam’s lips are against Ronan’s jaw when there’s a pop followed by several cracks and then Adam exhales violently, like the air has been pushed from his lungs. He sucks in a ragged breath. Sucks in another. Tries for air as his hands scrabble against Ronan’s shoulders. 

That’s when a branch presses itself up through Adam’s shoulder blades, tearing skin and shirt with almost identical ripping sounds that turn Ronan’s stomach. Sap seeps down his back across the shirt and over Ronan’s fingers. Ronan knows he should pull away. There are vines working their way up his calves and the sounds of Adam gasping for air might just haunt him for the rest of his life. He should turn and run, but he doesn’t know how to leave Adam behind, so he holds him tighter and presses his face into the still warm and soft dip of his shoulder.

Adam’s hands slide up so that they’re cupping Ronan’s cheeks, but they don’t push his face up. They just hold him there as fiercely as Ronan is holding on in return. Ronan closes his eyes and prays to be thrust back into the silence that he had so despised moments before, anything but the cracking sound of bones and branches. Adam has stopped trying to breathe. The shoulder beneath Ronan’s forehead goes hard and he gets his wish. The shifting stops.The sound stops. Ronan does not move. He can’t make himself move for what feels like a lifetime. 

Eventually, the sound of the stream gets to him. He hates it more than he has ever hated even himself. He pulls back, extracts his face from the branches of Adam’s hands, untangles the vines from around his legs, and stands with his eyes closed, listening to the sound of his own breathing and feeling the fresh and jagged gash of this loss. It’s a truer feeling than even the embarrassment and swell of anger he’d felt at Adam’s one word response. One word to shut down the existence of hope in Ronan Lynch. One boy to gut him here on his own turf. 

When he brings himself to open his eyes the sight is beautiful and terrifying. Adam is not gnarled and grotesque. He is exquisite, like he was carved from a single ancient oak. Even the folds of his eyelids are present in what he has become. There are green leaves sprouting from the tips of his fingers and from the twist of branches rising above his head like a crown. There’s another perfect, undamaged flower sitting in the palm of his hand. Ronan reaches out and plucks it. Another takes its place. 

He turns his back on Adam and raises his fist to the impassive iron sky. “Don’t you fucking dare,” he shouts to the still too-silent trees. “Don’t you even fucking think about touching one hair of him. You are renting him, do you hear me? He doesn’t exist solely for you. He doesn’t exist solely for either of us!” 

The forest answers with a rhythmic pounding of thunder and Ronan feels his heart beat a tattoo in response, like he’d been holding it in stasis this whole time. He drops to the ground and crawls backwards until he’s pressed up to Adam’s trunk, let’s the fog roll in around him. There’s another rhythmic pounding and then Ronan is floating above himself in his bed. The door to his room opens with a flutter of speeding tickets, splashing in light from the main room. Adam comes in with Gansey on his heels. 

“Just tell me everything is okay,” Gansey says. “Because you look like shit. You promised to stop fighting each other.”

“Everything will be fine.” Adam’s voice is rough and miserable, like he’s been yelling or crying, or maybe both. “At least, I think. Just. Please.” He places his hand on Gansey’s shoulder, the crook of his fingers acting as a physical question mark. 

Gansey looks from Adam’s hand to Ronan’s sleeping figure on the bed and sticks his bottom lip out in thought. Finally, he says, “I trust you.” 

“Thank you,” Adam replies, and they all know he means it.

Gansey leaves and Adam closes the door behind him. Ronan wills himself down and back in control as Adam gingerly sits on the side of his bed and whispers his name in the dark. Chainsaw rattles nervously in her cage. 

Ronan wakes with a gasp and springs into a sitting position, pulling away from Adam by crawling up onto his pillows. He pulls his knees up to his chest with the sheet still draped over them and wraps his arms around them, trying not to think about the nakedness of him so close to Adam. Adam who is breathing normally and wearing his own clothes. 

“What?” Ronan snarls, unable to produce a neutral tone through the exhaustion and fear he’s carried out of the dream with him. There is sap on Ronan’s hands from where that Adam bled on him. They’re balled into fists, the fingers of his right hand pressed around a crumpled yellow flower. He squeezes it tightly. “Didn’t get enough of my humiliation earlier?” 

“Ronan,” Adam says again, still in his small, plaintive whisper. Ronan can’t tell in the dark whether his eyes are actually red or just rimmed by shadow. Adam reaches out a hand and touches Ronan’s fist lightly. “Ronan.” 

“What?” Ronan says again, merely churlish this time. “It’s going to be my name no matter how many times you say it.” 

“I’m sorry,” Adam says. He pulls his hand back and rests it in his lap. “I didn’t mean. I didn’t want you to leave like that.” 

“Sure had a funny way of making me think otherwise.” Ronan looks up at the weak moonlight coming in through the windows. He can’t help but see a rigid, wooden face over Adam’s own soft cheeks and forehead. “What took you so long in coming after me? Have to come up with a way to let me down easy? I don’t need one. Just keep being Gansey’s friend, he needs you. I’ll try to stay out of your way.” 

“No,” Adam says. It’s the loudest thing he’s said all night. “No, I don’t want to let you down. I want--” 

“What?” Ronan looks Adam in the eye, giving him no chance to back down from this now that it’s begun

Adam swallows and the movement in his throat is careless and easy in a way that fills Ronan with joy. He’s not a horror, not a tree, not a nightmare. He’s still real. Ronan is prepared to stay as far from him as possible to keep him that way.

“I want you,” Adam says. He does not say it with his body. He holds himself contained very carefully, as if afraid to move and give something away. It’s ridiculous. After so many nights in the dark there isn’t anything about Adam Parrish left to hide. Not from Ronan, anyway.

Ronan snorts. “You cannot possibly want me.” 

“Why not?” 

“Look at you,” Ronan says. “You’re afraid to touch me. You’re afraid of talking to me. You’re afraid I’m going to snap and do something stupid and ruin everything.” That last fear, he realizes belatedly, is not Adam’s at all, but he lets it sit. 

“I’m not afraid of you, Ronan.” Adam sighs. “I’m afraid of us. It’s terrifying. I’ve never needed someone the way I need you and your magic. And not even physically. It’s not a lust, or hasn’t been I suppose. I just need to know you’ll be there when Cabeswater finally takes me over. I need to know you’ll be there to pull me back out. And if I screw this up, if I run you off, you won’t be.” He shrugs and pulls himself further onto the bed, crossing his legs. He lets his gaze fall into his lap, having said his piece. 

“That’s going to be a problem.” 

Adam waits a beat. “Why?”

“The way I want you? It’s at least eighty percent lust.” 

A slow smile works its way across Adam’s face. “Eighty percent, huh? I’m not a piece of meat.”

“You’re right,” Ronan says. “Maybe only seventy-five percent. Sometimes your brain is useful too I guess.” 

“Says the boy who got a C on his Trig test.” 

“That is a testament to your teaching skills.” Ronan slides down the bed, moving closer to Adam but not touching him. He’s not going to be making anymore first moves tonight. 

Adam rolls his eyes. “Thanks.” 

“I mean it,” Ronan says. “Without your hard work I would have gotten an F.” 

“Why must you make everything so hard?” Adam asks quietly. He reaches out and places his hands over Ronan’s balled up fists, uses his thumbs to pry them open. “And why are are your hands sticky?” The flower falls onto the comforter between them. Adam reaches down and picks it up, holding it out and twirling it in his fingers. “What is this?”

“It’s a warning,” Ronan says. 

“Of what?” 

“Does it matter?” 

“Does it matter to you?” Adam leans forward, closing some of the space between them. 

“Yes.”

“Then it matters to me, but you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” 

“I want to tell you everything,” Ronan says. “It’s horrible.” 

Adam lets out an amused puff of breath. “Yeah, yeah. I can see how that would be painful, pairing words with feelings. It’s rough.” 

“You’re an asshole.” Ronan reaches out with his sticky hands and pushes Adam’s shoulders.

Adam rocks back and forward again, taking Ronan’s hands in his own. “I am,” he says, “which is why I’m going to do this without even asking.” 

Ronan finds himself kissing Adam Parrish for the second time this evening, but it’s finally, finally the right one. The ruddy forest of a boy who is not one tree, but every tree. Who is not a single whisper in the silence, but a cacophony of thoughts and sounds that deafen Ronan on a daily basis. Warm blood and stubborn bone and soft skin that sticks to Ronan’s sap covered fingers. Adam doesn’t complain, he just leans into the touch, cups Ronan’s face in his hands and crushes the flower against his cheek.


End file.
